Research Associates and Fellows

Kim specializes in the archaeology of late antique religions, domestic architecture, and Roman economics. She received her doctorate from Princeton University, held a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University and assistant professorships at Fordham University and Cornell University. Author of four books and dozens of articles, she has just completed major field project on Roman poverty in Tuscany, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Kim was the 22nd director of the American Academy in Rome.

Ann Brownlee's research interests focus on Greek vase-painting, particularly Archaic Corinthian and Attic black-figure. She is preparing a study of the Archaic Corinthian pottery from the so-called Potters' Quarter at the site of Ancient Corinth. In 2016, she was a Kress Publication Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies and spent the spring semester in Athens and Corinth. With AAMW alumna Valentina Follo, she is currently conducting a study of the Museum’s collection of Attic black-figure pottery from excavations in the 1890s in the Etruscan city of Orvieto. She is also interested in 19th century collectors of antiquities, especially in Philadelphia, and in the history of museums, in particular the University of Pennsylvania Museum and its building; she was co-author of its monumental Historic Structure Report. Ann Brownlee is also the co-director of the Museum’s Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum project and is editing and preparing for publication two volumes in the series.

Ivan Drpić (BA, University of Belgrade, MA and PhD, Harvard) specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of Byzantium and its Slavic neighbors in Southeastern Europe, with emphasis on the period from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. His areas of research and teaching interest include the interplay between the visual and the verbal, medieval aesthetics and theories of the image, the agency of art objects, the history of subjectivity, and the cultural interactions between Byzantium and the Slavic world. His scholarship has received recognition from a number of sources, including the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where he held the David E. Finley Fellowship.

Drpić’s first book, Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 Runciman Prize, explores the nexus of art, personal piety, and self-representation in the last centuries of Byzantium, focusing upon the evidence of verse inscriptions, or epigrams, on artworks. Drpić is currently developing a second book project, The Enkolpion: Object and Self in Medieval Byzantium, which considers the complex interplay between subjectivity, materiality, and the power of things in Byzantine culture. Drpić’s other projects in preparation include an edited volume on Byzantine monumental painting; a study of the inscribed artworks associated with Jefimija the Nun, one of the most intriguing personages from medieval Serbia; and an essay on the aging of icons.

Clark Erickson is interested in how archaeology can provide a long-term perspective on environmental change, biodiversity, and sustainable management. Since 1974, Erickson's Andean and Amazonian research focuses on the contribution of archaeology to understanding the complex human history of the environment and cultural activities that have shaped the Earth. Erickson uses historical ecology, landscape archaeology, and applied archaeology to understand the long-term complex human history of the environment and cultural activities that have shaped the Earth. His contributions include the human role in contemporary biodiversity, indigenous knowledge systems, native agriculture, sustainable landuse, and cultural landscape structure and aesthetics. He has considerable experience collaborating with descendant communities on applied archaeology projects with potential for sustainable development (Quechua in Peru, Cofán in Ecuador, and Arawak in Bolivia). Most recently, Erickson investigated pre-Columbian cultural landscape in the wetlands, forests, and savannas of the Amazon region of Bolivia (raised fields, ring ditches, fish weirs, causeways, and canals). He is editor of two recent volumes Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology: Studies in the Neotropical Lowlands (2006) and Landscapes of Movement: Trails, Paths, and Roads in Anthropological Perspective (2009) in addition to numerous other scientific and popular publications. Erickson is currently Associate Professor in Anthropology at U. Penn and Associate Curator of the American Section of the Penn Museum. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, H. John Heinz Charitable Trust, the University Research Foundation, American Philosophical Society, and the Interamerican Foundation.

Grant Frame received his Ph.D. in Assyriology from the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, and his M.A and B.A. from the department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Toronto. His area of specialization is the history and culture (economy, politics, religion, and society) of Mesopotamia in the first millennium BC and Akkadian language and literature. His books include Babylonia 689–627 B.C.: A Political History (Leiden, 1992); Rulers of Babylonia: From the Second Dynasty of Isin to the End of Assyrian Domination (1157–612 BC) (Toronto, 1995); and The Archive of Mušēzib-Marduk, Son of Kiribtu and Descendant of Sîn-nāṣir: A Landowner and Property Developer at Uruk in the Seventh Century BC (Dresden, 2013). He is one of the editors of Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie(Munich) and is director and editor-in-chief of the NEH-funded Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period project, for which he is preparing a volume on the official inscriptions of Sargon II (721–705 BC).Dr. Frame is also epigraphist for the Rowanduz Archaeological Project in Iraqi Kurdistan and is currently the director of Penn's Center for Ancient Studies.

Cam Grey works on Roman social and economic history, particularly the history of non-elite and marginal populations such as beggars, criminals, and foreigners. His doctoral work focused on how rural communities functioned in Late Antiquity, and what happened when consensus broke down. He is also interested in the use of comparative methodologies, theoretical perspectives and model-building in contemporary ancient history writing. His teaching covers topics in Roman social, economic, agrarian, and legal history, from the Archaic period to Late Antiquity; and Greek and Roman historiography, both ancient and modern.

Sarah Guérin is a medieval art historian whose research focuses on ivory carvings from around the Mediterranean world. Some of the myriad questions she has addressed concern trade routes, materiality, technique, facture, and function in both liturgy and devotion. Her teaching on medieval Europe (700–1400) carries forward a deeply object-oriented approach to a broad range of cultural products, including but not limited to architecture, sculpture, paintings, textiles, glass and metalwork of all kinds. Guided by her interest in elephant ivory, she has sought to integrate Africa south of the Sahara into her broad consideration of medieval cultural production. For current seminars and a list of courses taught, please see her departmental home page.

Emily Hammer (BA, Bryn Mawr College; PhD Harvard University) is an anthropological archaeologist of the Middle East and South Caucasia. Her research applies spatial analyses to material culture to investigate the territorial organization of ancient polities, the development of early cities, and long-term changes in the interactions between culture and environment. She uses geographic information science (GIS) methods, archaeology, and archival research as tools for recovering human experiences that have otherwise been sidelined in narratives about the past, particularly the experiences of mobile pastoralists and other communities that lived in agriculturally marginal environments such as deserts and highlands.

Through field research in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, and Iraq, she has studied the relationship between mobile pastoral and sedentary communities of the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and medieval/Ottoman periods. Her current collaborative projects include a survey at the Mesopotamian site of Ur in southern Iraq, a survey of fortresses and settlements in Naxçıvan, Azerbaijan, and two laboratory research projects on mass-kill hunting traps (desert kites) in eastern Jordan and pre-Islamic fortification patterns in the Balkh oasis of northern Afghanistan. As a participant in the global collaborative project “LandCover6K,” she is working with other historians and archaeologists to reconstruct land use over the last 6000 years in the Middle East and other parts of Asia in order to improve climate change modeling.

Lothar Haselberger's research interests are focused on the exploration of Greco-Roman Architecture in its practical and theoretical implications, from millimeter-refinements of ancient stone-carving to "macroscopic" aspects of urbanism, from the documentation of ancient construction drawings (focusing on the Temple of Apollo at Didyma, Turkey, and the Pantheon in Rome) to analyzing theories of design, visibility, and city building in the writings of Philo of Byzantium, Vitruvius, and others. Currently, he is specially interested in the modes and media in the ancient transmission of design, the changes and ruptures in that tradition, and the literal application of Vitruvian "design recipes" now tangible in major temples (Didyma temple; Augustus' Temple of Mars Ultor; Hadrian's Pantheon) and cities (Pergamon; Alexandria).

Sebastian Heath is a specialist in Roman pottery, numismatics and the application of digital technologies to the study of the ancient Mediterranean world. He has participated in excavation and survey in Cyprus, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, Tunisia, Turkey and the United Kingdom. Current research includes the publication of Roman pottery from the Lower City at Troy. He is co-editor with Billur Tekkök of the digital publication Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion and also co-edits The Pylos Regional Archaeological Project: Internet Edition. Dr. Heath currently serves as an Academic Trustee of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Renata Holod received her Honours B.A. in Islamic Studies from the University of Toronto, an M.A. in the History of Art from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in Fine Arts from Harvard University. She has conducted archaeological and architectural fieldwork in Syria, Iran, Morocco, Central Asia, Turkey, Tunisia and Ukraine.

She has co-authored and edited several works including: City in the Desert: An Account of the Archaeological Expedition to Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, Syria, Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs XXIII/XXIV, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978; Architecture and Community: Building in the Islamic World Today (Aga Khan Award Series), Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1983; Modern Turkish Architecture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984, 2nd ed. Istanbul, 2005; The Mosque and the Modern World, London: Thames & Hudson, 1997; The City in the Islamic World, Handbook of Oriental Studies 94, Leiden: Brill, 2008; An Island through Time: Jerba Studies, I, 2009, volume 1, and volume 2 forthcoming. A monograph on the Qipchaqs, The Last Kurgan: A Thirteenth Century Prince’s Burial in the Black Sea Steppe is in preparation.

Renata Holod is the Curator of the Near East Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She curated exhibitions of museum materials, such as: “ ‘From the Two Pens’: Line and Color in Islamic Art”, guest curator of exhibition at Williams College Museum of Art, October-December 2002; and “Line and Letter: Studying a 16th Century Shirazi Manuscript” exhibition at the Rare Book Gallery, Van Pelt Library, March-May 2005. She is founding member of the Committee on Visual Studies at Penn (http://www.arthistory.upenn.edu/vlst/program.html) . She has worked with Computer Graphics@Penn, School of Engineering to recreate interior lighting in architecture: http://cg.cis.upenn.edu/hms/research/Archaeology/. More recently, she co-curated the September 2010 – June 2011 exhibition “Archaeologists and Travelers in Ottoman Lands” (www.ottomanlands.com) at the Penn Museum. In October 2011 – January 2012, it opened in its second iteration at the Pera Museum, Istanbul under the name Osman Hamdi Bey and the Americans.

She has served as Convenor, Steering Committee Member, and Master Jury Chair of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. As architectural consultant, she has worked with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), Arthur Ericson Architects, Venturi Scott-Brown Architects, Mitchell/Giurgola Associates, H2L2, Michael Graves & Associates, and the Center for Architecture in NYC.

She has been appointed Kolb Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology since 1987. She was Clark Fellow in 1999, and Clark Professor at Williams College and the Clark Institute in 2002. In 2004, the Islamic Environmental Research Centre honored her with an Award for outstanding work in Islamic Architectural Studies. In 2010, she received the University of Pennsylvania Provost’s Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring, and was named College of Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities.

She is member of the Advisory Boards of the following journals: Muqarnas, the annual on Islamic visual culture; Ars Asiatiques; Arkheolohiia, journal of the Institute of Archaeology, Kyiv; andtheInternational Journal of Islamic Architecture. She is member of theScientific Committee for the Fondation Max Van Berchem, Geneva. She served as President of the Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) 2008-2010. Since June 2013, she is also serves as President, Board of Trustees of The Ukrainian Museum, New York.

Ann Kuttner's research and teaching interests lie in Hellenistic, Roman and Late Antique socio-political history, visual language, and material culture. She also advises projects in the Renaissance rapprochement with the Roman legacy. Long interested in luxury arts as domestic display, and public sculptural decoration and architectural programming, she has in the last years expanded research to include landscape architecture, painting, the character of the Roman domus and villa, and relations between textual production and visual language. A list of courses recently taught and a cv are posted at her History of Art home page. She is a member of the Graduate Group in Ancient History, and is among the associated faculty in the Graduate Groups of the Departments of Classical Studies and of Religious Studies.

Richard M. Leventhal is Executive Director of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center of the Penn Museum as well as Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. He serves as Curator in the American Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology where he formerly served as the Williams Director. Prior to coming to Penn, he was the President of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. Leventhal received his PhD from Harvard University. He is one of the Directors of the Tihosuco Heritage Preservation and Community Development Project focused upon the 19th century Caste War rebellion in the Yucatan. He has written extensively about the ancient Maya and about cultural heritage preservation.

Leventhal’s research interests include cultural heritage preservation and economic development, particularly the direct connection between local communities and heritage preservation and community development, along with implementation projects for heritage preservation and development in Mexico, Syria, Iraq, and other locations throughout the world. He has an active field program in the Maya area within the Yucatan of Mexico called the Tihosuco Heritage Preservation and Community Development Project. Other interests include museums and monuments in the 21st century, the archaeology of ancient Mesoamerica, and the intellectual history of American archaeology.

Jeremy McInerney has excavated in Israel, at Corinth, and on Crete. He serves on the Managing Committee of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece, where he was Whitehead Professor in 2013-14. Professor McInerney's research interests include topography, epigraphy and historiography. He is the author of The Folds of Parnassos: Land and Ethnicity in Ancient Phokis (Austin, 1999) and The Cattle of the Sun. Cows and Culture in the World of the Ancient Greeks (Princeton, 2010). He has published articles in a variety of academic journals including Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, the American Journal of Archaeology, Hesperia, and California Studies in Classical Antiquity. In 2014 Wiley-Blackwell published his edited volume on ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean. In 2016 Brill published the latest volume in the PENN/Leiden series of colloquia on ancient values, a volume on landscape coedited by McInerney and Ineke Sluiter. He is currently completing a new history of Ancient Greece for Thames and Hudson

Sheila Murnaghan is the author of Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey (Princeton 1987) and the co-editor of Women and Slaves in Greco Roman Culture: Differential Equations (Routledge 2000). She works in the areas of Greek epic, tragedy, and historiography; gender in classical culture; and the classical tradition. Her current projects concern the tragic chorus, Herodotus, and twentieth century women writers and the classics.

Holly Pittman has excavated in Cyprus, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran and has had primary publication responsibilities of the art and especially the glyptic art from the sites of Malyan in the Fars province of Iran; Uruk period Tell Brak; and Uruk period Hacienbi Tepe. She co-curated the traveling exhibition of the "Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur" from the Penn Museum. Her current research interests revolve around the excavations of the sites of Konar Sandal South and North in the region of Jiroft in south-central Iran. Dr. Pittman has participated in two seasons of excavation of the two mounds and the exploration and survey of the region.

Lauren Ristvet (BA, Yale 1999; MPhil, PhD, Cambridge 2005) specializes in Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern history and archaeology, with an emphasis on the formation and collapse of archaic states, landscape archaeology, human response to environmental disaster, and ancient imperialism. She is the associate director of excavations at Tell Leilan, Syria (ancient Shehna/Shubat-Enlil), where she has excavated since 1999. This was one of the largest ancient cities in Northern Mesopotamia, and the short-lived capital of the Kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia during the 18th century B.C. She is also co-director of the Naxcivan Archaeological Project in Naxcivan, Azerbaijan, a combined survey and excavation project. She is the author of In the Beginning: World History from Human Evolution to the First States (McGraw-Hill, 2007) and is preparing two monographs, Altered States: Ritual and the Creation of Mesopotamian Polities, and Consuming Empire: Cultural Imperialism in Antiquity.

Brian Rose focuses on the archaeology of both Italy and Anatolia between the Iron Age and Roman Imperial periods. Between 1988 and 2012 he directed Post-Bronze Age (Greek, Roman, Byzantine) excavations at Troy, and serves as English language editor of Studia Troica, the annual journal of the Troy excavations. His synthesis of the excavations at Troy (The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Troy) was published by Cambridge in 2014, and the publications of Troy’s West Sanctuary and Roman houses is forthcoming. He surveyed the Granicus River Valley in northwestern Turkey for four years, with a focus on recording and mapping the Graeco-Persian tombs that dominate the area. He now serves as director of Penn’s excavations at Gordion, and has recently edited three monographs: The New Chronology of Iron Age Gordion, The Archaeology of Phrygian Gordion, and The Golden Age of King Midas.

His research has also concentrated on the political and artistic relationship between Rome and the provinces, which he presented in Dynastic Commemoration and Imperial Portraiture in the Julio-Claudian Period (Cambridge, 1997). As curator-in-charge of the Penn Museum’s Mediterranean Section, he recently curated an exhibit on MIdas and Phrygia that highlighted Penn’s discoveries at Gordion since 1950. He is a Trustee of the American Academy in Rome and a member of the Board of Directors of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.

For the past 25 years, Dr. Tartaron has participated in regional-scale studies of the Greek past, in which his principal focus has been on the Bronze Age. Among these have been major regional landscape archaeology projects: the Berbati-Limnes Archaeological Survey, the Nikopolis Project, and the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS). His current project, co-directed with Daniel Pullen of the Florida State University, is entitled the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (SHARP). This research centers on the recently discovered Mycenaean harbor town at Kalamianos, south of Corinth. Dr. Tartaron has devoted his recent research to studying local- and regional-scale maritime networks and maritime coastal communities of the Bronze Age, resulting in his 2013 book Maritime Networks in the Mycenaean World. This book was awarded the James R. Wiseman Book Award by the Archaeological Institute of America in 2016. A current outgrowth of this research is a new ethnoarchaeological project in Kerala state, India, which includes recording oral histories from older fisher men and women in traditional fishing villages there.

Steve Tinney is focussing his efforts on bringing Sumerian online. The Penn Sumerian Dictionary will be much more than a list of Sumerian words and their English meanings. It will also be accessible through an English-language interface that will include grouping of words conceptually and by object-type. Because the word-definitions will link to examples of usage in the online collections of Sumerian texts, the Sumerian Dictionary will be a gateway to early Mesopotamian culture. The team plans to augment the Dictionary with essays on concepts, material culture and ethnographic matters to enhance its cultural function.

Dr. Turfa has participated in excavations in the U.S., United Kingdom, Italy and Greece, including Corinth and Etruscan Poggio Civitate (Murlo), and in research projects at the Manchester Museum, Liverpool Museum and British Museum. She was Curatorial Consultant for the reinstallation of the Kyle M. Phillips Etruscan Gallery of the Penn Museum. She has taught at universities in the U.S. and United Kingdom, lecturing on the Etruscans, Phoenicians and Carthaginians, and on trade and architecture in the ancient Mediterranean. Her published research includes Etruscan religion, medicine, technology, seafaring and trade, art and architecture, and she is completing books on Etruscan-Punic Relations, and the Etruscan Brontoscopic Calendar. She is a Foreign Member of the Istituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici, and a Research Associate at the Penn Museum.

Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Penn

Assistant Curator of the Egyptian Section at the Penn Museum

Joe Wegner focuses his research on Middle Kingdom Egypt and is currently conducting archaeological excavations at South Abydos, Egypt. In 2002-2003 he conducted two seasons of fieldwork at Abydos, and completed magnetic resonance mapping in and around the current excavation site of the mortuary complex and town of Senwosret III, which he has been excavating since 1994. The purpose of this work was to provide evidence for as-yet-unknown buildings and other structures in the area of the Senwosret III complex. During March-April 2003, Dr. Wegner conducted excavations of a mastaba-tomb, with a massive sarcophagus and burial chamber, which may be a royal tomb belonging to a king of the 13th Dynasty.

Donald White excavated in eastern Libya from 1964 through 1981, first the port city of Apollonia, then Cyrene's Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone. During the 1980's he excavated the Late Bronze Age island site of Bates's Island on Egypt's NW coast. From the early 1990's on he oversaw as Chief Curator the renovations of the Greek, Roman and Etruscan galleries of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. As author and co-author of six final excavation monographs and over 70 articles, he is an authority on the archaeology of Egypt's NW coast and the Libyan Greek Pentapolis.

Julia Wilker is an ancient historian focusing in the Near East in Hellenistic and Roman times, especially the history of Judaea and the Jewish diaspora from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE. She is particularly interested in cross-cultural interactions and concepts of identity and normativity in the ancient world. She has published on the Hasmonean and Herodian dynasties, Roman-Jewish relations, and Roman client kings. Her current research focuses on non-religious elites in Hellenistic and Roman Judea and the role of women in the Judean dynasties. Her second field of interest is the history of late classical Greece, in particular the rise of Macedonia and interstate relations in the period between the Peloponnesian War and the rule of Alexander.

Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Penn

Associate Curator-in-charge of the Near East Section at the Penn Museum

Since 1989, Richard Zettler has been the director of Penn's excavations at the site of Tell es-Sweyhat, located on the east bank of the Euphrates in northern Syria. In addition to his work on Tell es-Sweyhat, he continues his long-standing interest in the meshing of textual sources and material culture to build more holistic histories of ancient Mesopotamia. Dr. Zettler co-curated the Museum's traveling exhibit "Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur" and is also involved in other major Museum projects including efforts to make more of the collections from excavations at Ur available to other institutions and the restoration of the Urnamma Stele.